None of the players here were in Ben Affleck’s The Town, but this feels like a companion piece to that one, too, in both its entertainment value and occasional overplayed hangdog Damon-Affleck pathos.

The true fatal flaw of Harold and the Purple Crayon is that everything—from the story to the visual design—feels like it came pre-packaged in a microwave dinner.

Mäkelä can capture something real about queer nightlife, shooting evocative moments at a drag king show, but that ability only makes you wish he’d abandon his main character—or at least let him mature a bit before subjecting us to him.

Deadpool & Wolverine is another mind-numbingly corporatized CGI fest, divorced from any true emotional stakes. It’s a picture that would rather tell you how to feel than make you feel.

Shujun’s script, co-written with Yu Hua and Kang, eschews any viewer hand-holding, keeping its messages and themes backgrounded; if there is a greater context for the film’s plot, perhaps it lies in its depiction of law enforcement in mainland China, and the toll police work takes on the people conducting it, though Western critics lacking background in contemporary Chinese social and political mores can at best only speculate at best.

Starve Acre is not one of those horror films that everyone going in blind will enjoy. It’s not a crowd pleaser or a popcorn thriller. It’s a steady, methodically engineered, beautifully realized meditation on the slow, persistent sting of grief, and a gentle unearthing of the things we bury deep in our souls.

If you’re using “fabulous” to mean fable-like, then The Fabulous Four is in fact fabulous—in that we’ve seen it in too many other stories before.

Oddity is simultaneously an impressive production and a bizarre lesson in the vagaries of fear: without visibly shifting its tactics, it can be shiver-inducing in a few scenes and tedious in others.

Twisters is, at best, pretty fun—a decidedly breezy two hours. It has thrills, and chills, and Glen Powell doing his darndest to bring the concept of “movie star” back into the year 2024.

Skywalkers: A Love Story certainly delivers on its promise of exhilarating footage of high-flying adventure-seekers.

In taking care to depict as much disappointment and frustration as heedless creative joy, the movie shunts some of Dandelion’s breakthroughs off-screen. It ends with a triumph that almost seems unaware of the degree to which Dandelion’s story hasn’t quite figured itself out.

Look Back is a requiem for art lost to violence, to circumstance, to conformity. It is also an argument to create.

This approach fundamentally misunderstands Eno’s entire creative ethos, which relies on technology to elevate—not replace—the unique human ability to create art, a quality that is sorely remiss here.

Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion.

Made in England winningly humanizes two filmmakers who were at one time so mythical that Scorsese genuinely had doubts about whether they really existed, or if those names might be pseudonymous, he admits in the documentary.

This closely choreographed chaos, paired with a harsh soundscape that gives off an anxiety-inducing underwater effect, ushers us into an enigmatic story of a family on the brink of unraveling.

It’s pleasant summer-evening entertainment like something out of 1995, and only occasionally gets too puffed up about what should be modest aims. That’s the advantage of pastiche: It’s hard to do it quite so self-seriously.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is wry with a side of quirk, unblinking in facing its subject matter head-on while refusing to pull punches; it isn’t without mercy, either.

Within the framework of grueling training exercises that never seem quite as difficult as the movie tries to make them sound, Space Cadet has some dumb fun. It pushes its luck big time when it moves into a hasty Armageddon knockoff that this movie has neither the budget nor the gravity to pull off.

The third release from Studio Ponoc, a Japanese animation studio formed by former Studio Ghibli staffers, The Imaginary is a little twinklier and more straightforward than its Ghibli cousins, with some dreamscapes that look suspiciously Lisa Frank-y. But it has more legitimate imagination than the sweaty whimsy of IF.

MaXXXine is iterative to the point that it might be too repetitive of previous entries, but at least it has a good time getting to the point.

Chicken for Linda! is a puckish film from directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach that gets at this question, using creative animation to portray a family coming to terms with an old meal and all the heartbreak that comes with it.

Despicable Me 4 loses focus like a golden retriever in a Petco plushie aisle, splitting characters into bottled subplots that can only be addressed in single-file order.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is a standardized comeback that moderately succeeds in balancing tradition with reinvention. The film doesn’t kick your door down and challenge your Beverly Hills Cop fandom—Molloy knocks politely on your door and shows you what you want to see. It’s a humble nostalgia bomb à la Live Free or Die Hard, one afraid to upset the apple cart and detrimentally one-note. But Eddie Murphy’s still Eddie Murphy, and that’s like sneaking in a cheat code.

The premise of Michael Sarnoski’s Day One hints at a more filled-in world, but plays more like a maudlin, shallow commercial for the franchise, aided by an overused, cloying score and simplistic, navel-gazing character arcs.

When King and Efron are grooving to their boss/assistant bickering beat, Affair is the most believable and entertaining. As for the rest, it’s been done better and with more depth in a zillion other films.

Those unfamiliar with the director’s penchant for narrative opacity might find Music falling on deaf ears. For those up for the challenge, there are splendid moments of visual poise to soak in, but little to actually take away in terms of tangible storytelling.

The Devil’s Bath is motivated by its character study, exploring the dread found at the intersections of rural peasant life, untreated mental health issues, a patriarchal environment and religious dogma through its almost documentary-like lens.